National Offer Day...

Thanks baubs.
Catmother, I don't know how it could be managed more easily in a large highly populated area with lots of schools with overlapping catchment areas and a few Grammars sprinkled here and there. When my eldest went into secondary each council handled its own applications and I think you got the letter from the school, but that was very open to abuse (we were offered 2 schools as there was no way to apply to the Grammar you were hoping for and the comp you had as fallback without 2 applications and therefore 2 offers. Some of her friends held onto both offers all through the summer hols while they "made up their minds", while some had no school at all until 5 September).
You can see how doing it centrally is the fairest way, and you can well imagine that it will be hard for them to have the capacity to deal with everyone logging on on one day of the year, and it all being such a fraught situation for so many parents.
I think most of all I wish that if they couldn't deliver the news on the morning of the 1st, they had always said it is National Offer Day 2 March. But we have National Offer Day 1 March (been hearing about it for nearly a year), whereas it will probably be National Offer Evening 1 March. And with a rather nervous girl who spends all her time with some very nervous friends (one went home ill today and it went round that she was stressed about school offers), the difference between Offer Day and Offer Evening is quite big....

You probably should have started your own Free School rusty.
Here in Suffolk we have 10,620 unfilled Secondary Schools places (this is not a joke). Seven new Secondary Free Schools will open in 2012 and 2013 and there are rumours of many more in the pipeline. You couldn't make it up!